Music Week

Back from three weeks on the road. I did manage to file a few blog posts
with link comments, but there wasn't much I could do with Music Week, or
indeed much to do until I got back. The incoming mail jumped up a level
while I was gone. I didn't take any new CDs with me. I did take a Chromebook
and listen to Rhapsody and jotted down a few record reviews, but I didn't
have a lot of time for that. (I got flak for playing Wadada Leo Smith, so
wound up switching to Oscar Peterson, but I wasn't able to sort out the
songbooks until I got home.)

I also fell out of the habit of writing tweet-length review lines, and
it doesn't seem like it would either be fun or all that useful to try to
catch up at this point. I'm due to post a Rhapsody Streamnotes before the
end of October, so you'll get the reviews soon enough. I only have about
50 notes in the draft file, so it will likely be the shortest one all year,
but those are the breaks.

I'll resume the grade-tweets after this post. One thing on my "todo"
list is to update the
Music Tracking 2014 file. One thing
not on my "todo" list is to organize another Turkey Shoot on Thanksgiving.
I wouldn't mind running it if someone else stepped forward (or you could,
as Christgau suggested to me, self-publish it on Medium). I am leaning
toward doing a metacritic file based on year-end lists (as opposed to
previous years when I folded year-long review data in). And I expect
there will be a Jazz Critics Poll, but don't have any details yet.

Weekend Roundup

Having jotted down one or two of these on the road, I figured on doing
a Sunday links column, followed by a Monday music column, just like normal
times. Didn't work out that way, but thanks to the magic of back-dating
my tardiness will eventually be forgotten.

I actually agree with a lot of what David Brooks says today. But -- you
know there has to be a "but" -- so does a guy named Barack Obama. Which
brings me to one of the enduringly weird aspects of our current pundit
discourse: constant calls for a moderate, sensible path that supposedly
lies between the extremes of the two parties, but is in fact exactly
what Obama has been proposing. [ . . . ]

Well, the Obama administration would love to spend more on infrastructure;
the problem is that a major spending bill has no chance of passing the House.
And that's not a problem of "both parties" -- it's the GOP blocking it.
Exactly how many Republicans would be willing to engage in deficit spending
to expand bus networks? (Remember, these are the people who consider making
rental bicycles available an example of "totalitarian" rule.)
[ . . . ]

It's an amazing thing: Obama is essentially what we used to call a
liberal Republican, who faces implacable opposition from a very hard
right. But Obama's moderation is hidden in plain sight, apparently
invisible to the commentariat.

Actually, when I think of Obama as a "liberal Republican" I flash
back to an earlier Illinois senator, Charles Percy, who was better on
foreign policy and no worse on economics or civil rights than Obama.
But Obama doesn't have the luxury of being a liberal Republican, or
for that matter a centrist Democrat. Today's Republicans allow no such
luxury, nor do today's problems. As far back as 1998, Jim Hightower
warned: "there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes
and dead armadillos." Today there's just more roadkill.

By the way, Krugman's too kind to Brooks, whom he quotes as saying,
"the government should reduce its generosity to people who are not
working but increase its support for people who are. That means reducing
health benefits for the affluent elderly . . ." You may wonder why the
party of the rich proposes adding means tests to Medicare. It's because
they don't want anyone to think they have a right to medical care.

Seth McElwee: Why Turning Out the Vote Makes a Huge Difference in Four
Charts: The charts show that non-voters are consistently more liberal
than voters, which reinforces the by-now-conventional view that Democrats
win when then can get the vote out, while the key for Republican gains is
voter suppression. This doesn't go into the question of why non-voters
don't vote, even though voting is one of the few ways they have to advance
their own interests. Clearly one reason is that the economic costs of
voting (which include things like the time it takes to vote) are high
enough to suppress turnout. Another likely reason is widespread cynicism
about politicians -- especially about Democrats, who appeal for public
support on election day but more often than not spend the rest of their
time triangulating between interest group lobbies, raising money that
they often see as more valuable in securing reëlection than any work
they do to benefit their constituents.

When voter turnout is discussed in public it is often treated as a civic
obligation, rather than a means to advance individual interests. Republican
candidates often denounce low-income voters for voting for the party that
best advances their class interests (while at the same time supporting
massive tax cuts for their rich constituents). Yet when Benjamin Page
interview the rich he finds that they, "acknowledged a focus on fairly
narrow economic self-interest" when discussing their engagement in the
political process. In this way, the recent Lil' Jon video, "Turnout For
What," while tacky, has reframed the voting as a means to forward political
interests, rather than as a civic obligation. Since some 41 percent of
non-voters claim that their vote wouldn't matter, this message is important.
It's also important to remove barriers to voting. Research by Jame Avery
and Mark Peffley finds, "states with restrictive voter registration laws
are much more likely to be biased toward upper-class turnout." In contrast,
states that have adopted same-day registration and vigorously enforced the
National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) have lower levels of class bias in
their electorate. Research also suggests that unions are an important
mechanism for low and middle income voters to engage with the political
process. Attempts to disempower than should also be viewed through the
lens of voter suppression.

Indeed, Republican opposition to unions seems to have more to do with
reducing their political effectiveness than as a favor to the rich. Since
their blip in 2010, when Obama voters took a nap, Republicans have seized
the opportunity to do as much as they could to suppress voting (as well
as to distort it through the infusion of extraordinary sums of money).
I expect this to produce some kind of backlash -- the message for those
who bother to pay attention is that your vote must be worth something,
otherwise why would they be so eager to take it away? -- but thus far
the clearest message is how shameless Republicans have become about
their desire to exclude a really large segment of the American people.
For more on voter suppression efforts, see
Jeffrey Toobin: Freedom Summer, 2015 (and from 2012,
Jane Mayer: The Voter-Fraud Myth).

Paul Woodward: Terrorism exists in the eye of the beholder: I was
in Arkansas Tuesday [October 22], when a soldier on duty at a "war
memorial" in Ottawa [Canada] was shot by a lone gunman, presumably
the person shot and killed later that day in Canada's Parliament
building. The TV was tuned into CNN, where they spent the entire day
blabbing on and on based on scant information and fervid imagination.
The shooter was later identified as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau.

In 2012 there were seven murders in Ottawa (population close to a million),
2013 nine murders, and so far in 2014 there have been five (including
yesterday's).

The overwhelming majority of the crazy men running round shooting
innocent people are on this side of the border. What makes them dangerous
is much less the ideas in their heads than the ease with which they can
lay their hands on a gun.

It's often hard to be clear about what should be described as
terrorism. What's much easier to discern is hysteria.

By the way, Zehaf-Bibeau's gun was evidently a
Winchester Model 94 lever-action rifle, a design that dates back to
1894 and is limited to eight rounds, which have to be individually loaded --
a very inefficient choice for a "shooting rampage."

Then on Friday [October 24], a high school student in suburban Seattle
went on his own
shooting rampage, killing two and injuring three more before shooting
himself. I missed CNN's wall-to-wall coverage (assuming that's what they
did), but it's safe to guess that the talking heads spent much less time
speculating on the shooter's ties to ISIS. For one thing, shooting each
other is just something Americans do.

I don't have time to dig through Israel's recent garbage, but if you
do here are some typical links from Mondoweiss:

Tom Engelhardt: Entering the Intelligence Labyrinth: An introduction,
or precis, of Engelhardt's new book, Shadow Government: Surveillance,
Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World
(paperback, Haymarket Books). It bears repeating that the US annually
spends $68 billion on 17 major "intelligence" agencies -- sorry for the
quotes but it's hard to think of them without choking on that word --
that do, well, what exactly? Sorry, that's a secret, but thanks to the
occasional leak or boast we do know a wee bit:

You build them glorious headquarters. You create a global surveillance
state for the ages. You listen in on your citizenry and gather their
communications in staggering quantities. Your employees even morph into
avatars and enter video-game landscapes, lest any Americans betray a
penchant for evil deeds while in entertainment mode. You collect
information on visits to porn sites just in case, one day, blackmail
might be useful. You pass around naked photos of them just for . . .
well, the salacious hell of it. Your employees even use aspects of the
system you've created to stalk former lovers and, within your arcane
world, that act of "spycraft" gains its own name: LOVEINT.

You listen in on foreign leaders and politicians across the planet.
You bring on board hundreds of thousands of crony corporate employees,
creating the sinews of an intelligence-corporate complex of the first
order. You break into the "backdoors" of the data centers of major
Internet outfits to collect user accounts. You create new outfits
within outfits, including an ever-expanding secret military and
intelligence crew embedded inside the military itself (and not counted
among those 17 agencies). Your leaders lie to Congress and the American
people without, as far as we can tell, a flicker of self-doubt. Your
acts are subject to secret courts, which only hear your versions of
events and regularly rubberstamp them -- and whose judgments and
substantial body of lawmaking are far too secret for Americans to
know about.

You have put extraordinary effort into ensuring that information
about your world and the millions of documents you produce doesn't
make it into our world. You even have the legal ability to gag
American organizations and citizens who might speak out on subjects
that would displease you (and they can't say that their mouths have
been shut). You undoubtedly spy on Congress. You hack into congressional
computer systems. And if whistleblowers inside your world try to tell
the American public anything unauthorized about what you're doing, you
prosecute them under the Espionage Act, as if they were spies for a
foreign power (which, in a sense, they are, since you treat the American
people as if they were a foreign population). You do everything to wreck
their lives and -- should one escape your grasp -- you hunt him implacably
to the ends of the Earth.

As for your top officials, when their moment is past, the revolving
door is theirs to spin through into a lucrative mirror life in the
intelligence-corporate complex. [ . . . ]

Keep in mind that the twenty-first-century version of intelligence
began amid a catastrophic failure: much crucial information about the
9/11 hijackers and hijackings was ignored or simply lost in the labyrinth.
That failure, of course, led to one of the great intelligence expansions,
or even explosions, in history. (And mind you, no figure in authority in
the national security world was axed, demoted, or penalized in any way
for 9/11 and a number of them were later given awards and promoted.)
However they may fail, when it comes to their budgets, their power,
their reach, their secrecy, their careers, and their staying power,
they have succeeded impressively.

In 120 countries across the globe, troops from Special Operations Command
carry out their secret war of high-profile assassinations, low-level
targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night
raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with
indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans.
Once "special" for being small, lean, outsider outfits, today they are
special for their power, access, influence, and aura.

That aura now benefits from a well-honed public relations campaign
which helps them project a superhuman image at home and abroad, even
while many of their actual activities remain in the ever-widening shadows.
Typical of the vision they are pushing was this statement from Admiral
Olson: "I am convinced that the forces . . . are the most culturally
attuned partners, the most lethal hunter-killers, and most responsive,
agile, innovative, and efficiently effective advisors, trainers,
problem-solvers, and warriors that any nation has to offer."

I suspect that the main target of that propaganda campaign is the
president, to drive home the point that "special forces" are a no-risk,
high-return, small scale option for any problem that can be solved
simply (with a bullet, that is).

Rory Fanning: Why Do We Keep Thanking the Troops?: I can't be the
only person who finds the constant adulation given to the "troops" of
the US military downright disgusting, but it sure is hard to find anyone
saying so in print. America has always cultivated hypocrisy, and those
in my generation suffered through more than usual dose. We noted the
beginnings of a cult of the troops in the Vietnam War, where failure
on the battlefield was ever-more-generously decorated with medals, but
memory was too close to WWII to get carried away: WWII was an intense,
all-encompassing collective effort; with so few uninvolved it would have
seemed silly to declare everyone a hero (although as memory dimmed that
eventually happened with the "greatest generation" hype). The obvious
excuse for putting troops on a pedestal today is that so few people
sign up (and many of them are tricked into thinking it's some sort of
jobs program). Still, this idolatry obscures one of the fundamental
political questions of our time: do the sacrifices of US troops do any
good for the vast majority of Americans who are otherwise uninvolved?
The answer, I'm certain, is no. If all the US had done after 9/11/2001
was to put out a few Interpol warrants, I doubt that even the tiny
number of "terrorist attacks" we've seen since would have happened.
Had we practiced policies in the Middle East favoring democracy and
basic human rights for all but eschewing intervention and arms sales
we probably would have missed out on 9/11 (and both Gulf Wars). Sure,
the troops had no real say in the decision to squander their lives in
a vain attempt to buttress the Neocon ego, but I'm not so sure they
shouldn't shoulder some of the blame. Back in the Vietnam War days
there was a popular saying: "suppose they gave a war and nobody came."
We were under no illusion that most of those who "came" for the war
then were compelled to do so. I can understand, and even sympathize,
how one might succumb to the force of the state -- I did, after all,
feel that force -- but for me that made those who resisted, either
by going to jail or avoiding that fate, were the era's real heroes;
nothing one could do in battle came close. Since the draft ended,
the choice to deny the war machine its bodies is less fraught, and
indeed most people choose that path. So today's troops range from
malevolent to the merely misinformed, but they all help to enable
a set of policies that ultimately do massive harm to the nation and
its people. And often, of course, they do great harm to themselves,
adding to the public costs of war. (Aside from the dead and maimed,
Fanning mentions that "there is a veteran suicide every 80 minutes
in this country," nor does the PTSD stop there.) Of course, there
are more nuances to the whole phenomenon, but at root is a common
misconception that those who "served" did something to protect the
rest of us, something that we all should be grateful for. That simply
did not happen. That they sacrificed for something we should regret
and be embarrassed by, well, that's more to the point. Only once we
recognize that can we get past the charades, and that will be better
for all of us.

David Bromwich: American Exceptionalism and Its Discontents:
Speaking of hypocrisies, here's the hoary mother lode, the notion
that we're so special the world wouldn't know what to do without
our enlightened guidance. Needless to say, the tone has changed
over time. Once America was unique in declaring that "all men are
created equal"; today our self-esteem is the very celebration of
inequality.

David Gerald Finchman: The hidden documents that reveal the true borders
of Israel and Palestine: In 1947 David Ben Gurion begged the UN to
vote in favor of partition borders for Palestine which would give 55% of
the mandate to a majority-Jewish nation that represented only 35% of the
total population, and 45% to an almost exclusively Arabic-speaking nation.
In 1948 Israel's Declaration of Independence proclaimed a Jewish State
but said nothing about borders. This unwillingness to define borders has
kept Israel in a state of war ever since, with Israel grabbing another
23% of the Mandate's territory during the 1947-49 war, and the remaining
22% in 1967 (plus chunks of Egypt and Syria). This piece looks into the
decision-making process from UN-borders to no-borders. A longer version
is available
here.

Karen Greenberg: Will the US Go to "War" Against Ebola? It's telling
that Obama's initial response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was to
send in the US military. That made some sense inasmuch as AFRICOM has
money to burn and some expertise in logistics, but it also imposes a
rigid worldview and introduces a dangerous level of intimidation. The
one thing Ebola does have in common with Terrorism is an exaggerated
level of hysteria, but that seems of a piece with the media's highly
orchestrated kneejerk reactions. I'm reminded of the anthrax scare of
2001, which would have soon gone freaking insane had the perpetrator
not had the good sense to stop. Greenberg points out many ways Ebola
differs from the Terrorism model.

Baldwin joins Saint-Amour, the law professors Lawrence Lessig, Jeanne
Fromer, and Robert Spoo, and the copyright lawyer William Patry in
believing that, Internet or no Internet, the present level of copyright
protection is excessive. By the time most works fall into the public
domain, they have lost virtually all their use value. If the public
domain is filled with items like hundred-year-old images of the back
of Rod Stewart's head, the public good will suffer. The commons will
become your great-grandparents' attic.

As it is, few creations outlive their creators. Of the 187,280 books
published between 1927 and 1946, only 2.3 per cent were still in print
in 2002. But, since there is no "use it or lose it" provision in
copyright law, they are all still under copyright today. Patry, in
his recent book, "How to Fix Copyright," notes that ninety-five per
cent of Motown recordings are no longer available. Nevertheless, you
can't cover or imitate or even sample them without paying a licensing
fee -- despite the fact that your work is not competing in the
marketplace with the original, since the original is no longer for sale.

A man's home is his castle, but a woman's body has never been wholly her
own. Historically, it's belonged to her nation, her community, her father,
her family, her husband -- in 1973, when Roe was decided, marital rape was
legal in every state. Why shouldn't her body belong to a fertilized egg as
well? And if that egg has a right to live and grow in her body, why shouldn't
she be held legally responsible for its fate and be forced to have a cesarean
if her doctor thinks it's best, or be charged with a crime if she uses
illegal drugs and delivers a stillborn or sick baby? Incidents like these
have been happening all over the country for some time now. Denying women
the right to end a pregnancy is the flip side of punishing women for their
conduct during pregnancy -- and even if not punishing, monitoring. In the
spring of 2014, a law was proposed in the Kansas Legislature that would
require doctors to report every miscarriage, no matter how early in the
pregnancy. You would almost think the people who have always opposed women's
independence and full participation in society were still at it. They can't
push women all the way back, but they can use women's bodies to keep them
under surveillance and control.

Peter Van Buren: Seven Bad Endings to the New War in the Middle East:
I know what you're saying: "only seven?" Van Buren doesn't get to the
political effects of continuing the War on Terrorism -- of continuing to
fund the surveillance state, of the increasing militarization of police
departments, of the circumvention of the justice system, of how public
funds are being drained as remote and preventable problems are prioritized
over real and immediate ones by a political establishment deeply in hock
to the security phantom.

When I'm Sixty-Four

When I was sixteen I probably knew every lyric to every Beatles song
extant, so it wasn't hard to recall at least the refrain of the jaunty
little title tune on my 64th birthday. "Will you still need me? Will you
still feed me?" Back then I wouldn't have had a clue who "you" might be,
but I never worried about food: my mother's theme song should have been
Cab Calloway's "Everybody Eats When They Come to My House" -- a house I
also didn't have a clue how to escape. I celebrated my 16th birthday a
couple months late by dropping out of high school. I stayed home a couple
days after Christmas when a cousin was visiting. I went back the next day
and was so sickened I never returned.

For the next five years I basically hid out in my attic room. I skewed
my hours to minimize contact with my parents and siblings, going to sleep
minutes before my father got up for work, waking mid-afternoon just in
time to watch Dark Shadows and Star Trek reruns. I had a
tiny black-and-white TV that ran out of stations shortly after midnight,
a tinny stereo with not much more than a dozen LPs, a typewriter, and a
growing collection of books and periodicals -- what I spent nearly all
of my $10/week allowance on. Evenings I could take the family car out,
mostly downtown to bookstores and the library. I was only at ease when
surrounded by books, and while my own life was locked down reading made
me aware of other worlds and other possibilities.

As I was traveling last week, it occurred to me that there are two
types of people in America today: those who can mentally put themselves
in other people's predicaments and empathize, and those who can't (or
just don't). What triggered this thought was a depression-era story
about Uncle Ted: he had heard vigilante threats against a destitute
family that had been stealing, so he picked them up and drove them to
another county where they had kinfolk; he explained later to his family
that he could imagine being so hungry that he might resort to stealing
too. Whenever I heard this story, I first think of my harsh experience
with thieves, but having known Ted and something of his life and history
I wind up recognizing that this story is more complex and nuanced than
my own narrow experience knows.

Of course, the point was reinforced many times as I watched political
commercials last week. The "two types" don't precisely split along party
lines. Indeed, Democrats can appeal to a majority along self-interest
lines -- and do so effectively when they point out how Republicans like
Tom Cotton (their Senate hopeful in Arkansas) are out to undermine and
even dismantle Social Security and Medicare -- but the Republican appeals
almost invariably depend on drawing lines between the voters they court
and everyone else (all those people outside their identity group, most
obsessively president Obama).

Of course, I didn't get to the ability to empathize with others very
early. As a child I was exceptionally selfish and greedy, and as an
adolescent I withdrew from my social network even before I physically
isolated myself. Therefore, much of my early reading focused on my own
experiences: education, psychology, religion. One most influential book
on the former was Charles Weingartner/Neil Postman's Teaching as a
Subversive Activity. Their main argument was that the most valuable
thing schooling could do was to encourage students to develop their own
finely tuned "bullshit detectors." Needless to say, school as I had known
it was strongly focused on rote learning -- including the stock moralism
of the day. But there was no shortage of bullshit in the late 1960s, so
detection soon became easy. I was soon reexamining every assumption I
had been brought up to believe. I had an earlier interest in mainstream
politics, so my move to the New Left had conventional framing (except
that my ancestral reference system was rooted deeper in Populism and
Republican Progressivism than in New Deal/Great Society Liberalism).

As I thought more critically, I came to realize that what gets called
madness is often just social nonconformity -- something I had developed
a literary and artistic taste for. As for my personal dysfunction, I was
much taken with Gregory Bateson's "double-bind theory of schizophrenia":
I could see how impossible it was to satisfy all the contradictory moral
authorities of my youth. That insight turned my personality problem into
a matter of logic, something that reason, and therefore I, could sort out.

Not that it was so simple. I had to force myself to socialize. In 1970
I got a GED and enrolled in Wichita State University. A year later I had
59 units of straight-A credit and a scholarship to transfer to Washington
University (St. Louis). Two years later I got my first job, was finally
able to support myself, and had had a couple of sexual relationships. A
couple years later I moved to New York and soon moved in with my first
wife. After she died several years later, I found another relationship,
and we've been together for more than twenty-five years now.

And now I'm sixty-four -- a milestone monumental enough to inspire a
pop song forty-eight years ago, but today it mostly means that I have
one more year to suffer through Obamacare (and, sure, be thankful for
that) before Medicare kicks in, eliminating one of the great worries of
my de facto retirement. Fifteen years ago I used to joke on my "career
assessment forms" that my "career goal" was retirement -- one of many
times I've crossed some unstated but expected line of conformity --
but I'm more or less there now. My father retired from his factory job
as soon as he could afford to, and thereby got a few good years before
a stroke pinned him down. For him, as for most people fortunate enough
to be able to afford it, retirement was freedom. I've enjoyed that same
freedom since SCO let me go in 2000. But while my work ethic hasn't
much flagged, I've become increasingly uncomfortable with my lack of
accomplishment (what in engineering we call "deliverables").

My recent travels gave me some time to think about this. I spent,
for instance, some time with the same cousin I played hooky to see
when I was sixteen. We reminisced, but also she poked some holes in
my inequality book outline, making me realize how difficult it's going
to be to craft arguments that are almost too obvious to me. I believe
that inequality is the core political issue of our time, but not so
much to balance everyone's supply of stuff as because it profoundly
corrupts our sense of justice, and losing the sense that the political
order is ultimately just unravels the whole social fabric. Indeed, it
may be that stuff is the wrong way to account for inequality. My working
title, Share the Wealth (from Huey Long), could just as well be
Share the Freedom -- assuming, as I've concluded, that it takes
a certain level of wealth to be free, although it's not clear that more
wealth makes one more free (although it has been shown that excess wealth
doesn't make one happier).

Better developed is an outline for an essay on Israel, something I
talked to several people about. The first two sections would explore the
only issues of importance to understanding why Israel's leaders have
acted for the better part of a century. The first concerns colonial
settler demography: the only places where settlers have retained power
are places where the population mix tilted decisely in favor of the
settlers (the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Argentina) while
everywhere settlers remained in the minority power has reverted to the
majority (most relevantly in South Africa and Algeria). Israel is in
between -- secure enough within its 1967 borders but far less so with
the Occupied Territories.

The second issue -- perhaps the first chronologically in that it
concerns the initial founding of the Zionist movement, but I think
it makes more sense to treat it second -- is the dependent dialectic
between Zionism and anti-semitism, how it has played out over history,
and how it has been twisted around in Israeli self-consciousness. As
anti-semitism has waned in the West this link can be questioned, but
it is deeply held within Israel, and that has many ramifications that
have to be understood. (Israel's obsession with security, for instance,
has as much to do with imagined enemies as with real ones.)

The third part would review all significant "peace" proposals since
the Peel Commission (or maybe the Balfour Declaration) and pick apart
why they have failed -- almost invariably because Israelis have been
unable (or unwilling) to reconcile their colonial project with emerging
standards of international law on human rights, and lately because
Israelis have been able to exploit the archaic rightward turn in US
foreign policy. In the past I've written up my pet ideas about how
the conflict could be resolved, and some of those ideas may return in
an epilogue but my experience is that few people care for my ideas as
long as they can hope for something more advantageous.

The other book-like project that came up here and there is the idea
of writing a memoir: basically a huge expansion of this post, although
I also see it as an occasion to write a personalized history of the era
from October 1950 -- a point just before the Chinese entered and turned
the tide in the Korean War -- to the present: a long history of imperial
decline, with most of the rot on the moral side. (It isn't exactly irony
that the US empire expanded as long as we were plausibly anti-imperialist,
then declined once we started believing in our destiny. It's just hubris.)

A memoir would also let me look back at where my family came from, how
they represented America, and what has happened to more than just me. I
could work in some of the stories we batted around on the Arkansas leg of
my trip. One of the political ads I saw last week lamented that Arkansas
was 48th of 50 states in job creation, but I know good and well that's an
old story: seven of my mother's cohort of eight siblings left Arkansas in
the 1930s looking for work elsewhere. (Three came to Kansas.) Their stories
are interesting, and while I'll never know enough to do them justice, I'd
like to know more, and use that as some sort of context. As odd as I grew
up, I came from remarkably average roots, and maybe there's some hope
in that.

I meant this to come out on my birthday, but events didn't let it
work out that way. I was touched by all the good wishes on Facebook,
but it was hardly a "great day" -- don't care to go into details, but
it slipped out of hand. And the resulting post is rather "stream of
consciousness" as I flit from one topic to another.

Weekend Roundup

Some scattered links this week:

Thomas B Edsall: The State-by-State Revival of the Right: Points out
that Republicans have "complete control" (governors and state legislatures)
in 23 states, "more than at any time since Dwight D. Eisenhower won the
presidency in 1952." Also that "they are exercising their power to gain
partisan advantage far more aggressively than their Democratic
counterparts."

The most visible effort is the drive to gut public sector unions, a key
source of votes and financial support for Democrats. Wisconsin, under
Republican Governor Scott Walker, has led the charge on this front. With
support from the Koch brothers, the state has severely restricted
collective bargaining rights for public employees, ended mandatory
union dues and limited wage hikes to the rate of inflation.

Both supporters and opponents of Walker's initiative realized that
this was a key battleground -- pathbreaking, in fact -- hence the
rallies, the recall and so on.

Many Republican-controlled states have weakened or eliminated laws
and regulations protecting the environment. In North Carolina the state
legislature cut the budgets of regulators and prohibited local governments
from enacting strict pro-environmental rules. The state chapter of the
League of Conservation Voters has rated members of the legislature every
year since 1999. Between 1999 and 2012, the group issued North Carolina
a total of 48 scores of zero. In 2013 alone, 82 North Carolina Republicans
got zeros. [ . . . ]

Democrats today convey only minimal awareness of what they are up
against: an adversary that views politics as a struggle to the death.
The Republican Party has demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice
principle, including its historical commitments to civil rights and
conservation; to bend campaign finance law to the breaking point; to
abandon the interests of workers on the factory floor; and to undermine
progressive tax policy -- in a scorched-earth strategy to postpone the
day of demographic reckoning.

One key point here is that this does not represent a turn in public
opinion toward the right. The Democratic Party collapsed in 2010 because
Obama gutted the successful national organization that Howard Dean had
built, then muddled all the key issues, many by thinking that bipartisan
approaches would be superior to partisan ones -- clearly a mistake the
Republicans didn't make.

Paul Krugman: In Defense of Obama: If some pollster came along and
asked me the standard question of whether I approve or disapprove of the
job Obama has done as president, I'd have to answer "disapprove." I'm not
unaware of, or unappreciative of, some positive accomplishments under
Obama. And I wouldn't withhold my approval just because I thought Obama
could have done more and better than he did. On the other hand, I can't
give him credit merely for not being as bad as any Republican -- especially
John McCain and Mitt Romney -- one might vote for a "lesser evil," but that
is no reason to approve of one. Nor should one go to the lengths of creating
strawman arguments like Krugman does here:

There's a different story on the left, where you now find a significant
number of critics decrying Obama as, to quote Cornel West, someone who
"posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit." They're
outraged that Wall Street hasn't been punished, that income inequality
remains so high, that "neoliberal" economic policies are still in place.
All of this seems to rest on the belief that if only Obama had put his
eloquence behind a radical economic agenda, he could somehow have gotten
that agenda past all the political barriers that have constrained even
his much more modest efforts. It's hard to take such claims seriously.

That's hardly the only critique of Obama from the left, but it shouldn't
be dismissed so cavalierly. One reason Obama failed to implement much of
the "change" he campaigned on in 2008 was that he stopped talking about
the need for such change as soon as he was elected. By backpedaling he
not only gave up on success, he let the issues vanish from public
discussion -- creating a vacuum that all the Tea Party nonsense quickly
filled. Maybe we expected more from Obama than he was ever willing to
deliver, but the ease with which he moved from critic of the status quo
to defender should have been alarming. What alarmed me more than anything
was how readily he dismantled the very successful Democratic Party
organization that Howard Dean had built -- giving credence to David
Frum's quip that where the Republican Party fears its base, the
Democratic Party despises its core constituency. Time and again the
people who paid the price for Obama's retreats were the people who
voted for him, whose trust he squandered, whose interests he sold out.

I pretty much accept Krugman's arguments for Obama's health care and
finance reform programs, and for various other details -- the value of
the stimulus, of higher tax rates on the rich, of more aggressive
environmental regulation, etc. Where I disagree most strongly is on
foreign policy, where Obama has failed to break decisively with neocon
orthodoxy on everything from Israel to Russia to Iran to Iraq. That is --
what else can he do? -- the point where Krugman resorts to the argument
that Obama isn't as bad as McCain. That strikes me as wishful thinking,
inasmuch as Obama has wound up doing exactly what McCain wants.

Rick Perlstein: The Long Con: Written in 2012, hence the introduction
on "Mittdacity," but the background info on the long association between
Republican propaganda and mail order scams and other cons is as apposite
as ever.

Midweek Update

OK, this is an on-the-road experiment: instead of collecting a week's
(or half-week's) links and comments, then posting the final result, I'll
try it bit-by-bit (with a delayed posting date):

Peter Beinart: Without a two-state solution, Americans will challenge
Zionism itself: Behind their paywall, but the basic argument is
that American liberals have tended to support Israel because they like
the appeal of Israel as a liberal democracy (like us) -- and the only
thing holding up the long-promised "two-state solution" is Palestinian
intransigence. However, that is in fact wrong -- pretty much categorically
so, as should be clear to anyone who listens to what Netanyahu and his
cohort say. If, in the end, all the "Jewish state" has to justify itself
with is an ethnocracy empowered by gratuitous violence -- i.e., about the
only plausible explanation of Netanyahu's tantrum this summer -- few
Americans (neocon militarists and Apocalypse-minded Christians) will be
willing to continue supporting Israel. That strikes me as fair, even if
a bit removed from the jingoism still dominant in US political discourse.

This dawning of reality would be taken as good news by most critical
thinkers, but Beinart remains committed to the Zionist idea that Israel's
existence is a good thing for Jews not only in Israel (where they are, in
Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar's phrase, "lords of the land") but also in
the Diaspora. A more accurate analysis would show that Zionism is
intrinsically hostile to the Diaspora, no matter how conveniently
Zionists suck up to generous (albeit misguided) foreign donors.

I still believe the best answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is
a democratic Jewish state alongside a democratic Palestinian one. I
believe that because, in a post-Holocaust world, I want there to be
one country that has as its mission statement the protection of Jewish
life. And I believe it because among both Palestinians and Israeli Jews,
nationalism remains a massively powerful force. To assume each community
could subordinate its deep-seeded nationalism to a newfound loyalty to
secular state strikes me as utopian. Secular binationalism barely works
in Belgium. Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea it's
probably a recipe for civil war.

But this requires arguing that Israel/Palestine is, at least right
now, fundamentally different than the United States. It requires defending
Zionism as something alien to the American experience, something necessary
because in Israel/Palestine, the civic nationalism we revere here is
neither possible nor desirable. That's very different than arguing that
the United States should support Israel because it's America's Middle
Eastern twin.

But if you take the "twin" aspect away, it's hard to see many Americans
caring about Jewish nationalism, especially since the anti-semitism that
Israel is supposedly the solution to is hardly evident -- nor is it clear
that Israel's "solution" really works.

Paul Krugman: Why Weren't the Alarm Bells Ringing?: Review of Martin
Wolf's The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned -- and Have Still
to Learn -- from the Financial Crisis, which explains the 2008 financial
meltdown and ensuing depression using the now-standard Minsky model: that
prolonged economic stability leads to financial laxness, excessive leverage,
and collapse. Krugman is skeptical that that's all there is to it.

First, while the depression that overtook the Western world in 2008 clearly
came after the collapse of a vast financial bubble, that doesn't mean that
the bubble caused the depression. Late in The Shifts and the Shocks
Wolf mentions the reemergence of the "secular stagnation" hypothesis, most
famously in the speeches and writing of Lawrence Summers (Lord Adair Turner
independently made similar points, as did I). But I'm not sure whether
readers will grasp the full implications. If the secular stagnationists
are right, advanced economies now suffer from persistently inadequate
demand, so that depression is their normal state, except when spending
is supported by bubbles. If that's true, bubbles aren't the root of the
problem; they're actually a good thing while they last, because they
prop up demand. Unfortunately, they're not sustainable -- so what we
need urgently are policies to support demand on a continuing basis,
which is an issue very different from questions of financial regulation.

Wolf actually does address this issue briefly, suggesting that the
answer might lie in deficit spending financed by the government's printing
press. But this radical suggestion is, as I said, overshadowed by his calls
for more financial regulation. It's the morality play aspect again: the
idea that we need to don a hairshirt and repent our sins resonates with
many people, while the idea that we may need to abandon conventional
notions of fiscal and monetary virtue has few takers.

I've always found "secular stagnation" to be an oddly opaque term. The
"persistent low demand" at its center is most certainly the effect of
increasing inequality, where most people are increasingly denied the
option to spend on real goods, while the rich often find their gains
wrapped up in the illusion of inflated asset prices. This is, of course,
a much deeper and more persistent problem than the stability of the banks.
The Bush-Obama (or Paulson-Geithner) solution was to save the banks,
figuring that if the front lines of the crisis held people wouldn't
suspect that there was anything more rotten at the core of the crisis.
But the fact that the "Obama recovery," like the "Bush recovery" before
it, feels so hollow should dispel us of such illusions.

But [Bill] Gross was by no means alone in getting these things wrong.
Indeed, 2011 was a sort of banner year for bad macroeconomic analysis
by people who had no excuse for their wrong-headedness. And here's the
thing: aside from Gross, hardly any of the prominent wrong-headers have
paid any price for their errors.

Think about it: 2011 was the year when Bowles and Simpson predicted
a fiscal crisis within two years. There was never a hint of crisis, but
BS are still given reverent treatment by the Beltway media.

2011 was also the year when Paul Ryan warned Ben Bernanke that he was
"debasing" the dollar, arguing that rising commodity prices were the
harbinger of runaway inflation; the Bank for International Settlements
made a similar argument, albeit with less Ayn Rand. They were completely
wrong, but Ryan is still the intellectual leader of the GOP and the BIS
is still treated as a fount of wisdom.

The difference is, of course, that Gross had actual investors' money
on the line. But you should not take that to imply that the profit motive
leads to intellectual clarity; Gross has been forced out at Pimco, but
I've seen hardly any press coverage tying that to his having the wrong
macro model.

Speaking of getting things wrong, also see
Jeff Madrick: Why the Experts Missed the Recession. Madrick's sources
are primarily recently released FOMC debates and "Greenbook" economic
forecasts, which show how completely events blindsided the very "experts"
who were responsible for setting Fed interest rates, and thereby adjusting
the economy.